else to prevent the triumph of Monk and the return of Charles without conditions, should be sequestered from his seat, and confined to his house at Raby, in the county of Durham, during the pleasure of parliament. A. D. 1660.-On the 2nd of January the House voted that a bill should be prepared for renouncing anew the title of Charles Stuart, and of all of the line of the late King James; yet on the 6th they received a letter from Monk promising all obedience and faithfulness to this parliament; and, in their infatuation, they voted Monk a letter of thanks, and desired him to come up to London as soon as he could. At York, Fairfax, the late lord general, waited upon Monk, and expressed his great willingness to contribute to the restoration of the Stuarts, against whose tyranny he had fought in many a bloody field. By the 26th of January Monk was at Northampton, where he protested that he was but a servant to the parliament in a military capacity. On the 28th he was at St. Alban's, where he again expressed all duty and obedience to the parliament. But, after keeping a day of fasting and prayer, he wrote from St. Alban's to require that all the soldiers of the English army that were in or about London should be removed, to make room for the godly and right-minded soldiers he was bringing with him from Scotland. The Rump ordered the troops out of town accordingly, and made Monk keeper of St. James's Park, having a few days before sought to please him by recommending Mr. Gamble, his chaplain, to be a fellow of Eton College. But some of the foot soldiers would not march out to make room for Monk, and falling into a mutiny they kept Somerset House as a garrison; but being assured of a month's pay, and cajoled by their colonel, these men were quieted, and marched off; and on the same day Monk marched into London in all state, with his horse and foot-and then the king's party talked very high, saying they were sure the king would be in England very shortly. Although Monk carefully concealed his intention of immediately recalling Charles, he soon opened the eyes of Haselrig and that party to the monstrous blunder they had committed. "It pleased him," says Whitelock, "that the secluded members of the Long Parliament should sit again; and neither Haselrig nor Scot, nor any of that party, could prevail with him to the contrary, nor durst any to oppose him; and the spirit of the people generally, especially of the Presbyterians, ran that way, and the cavaliers agreed to it, as the way to bring in the king." Indeed the London apprentices had been up in arms for this object; and Presbyterian petitions had been poured in for the reconstruction of the parliament as it was before Pride's Purge and the king's trial, when they and their brethren were the majority. On the 21st of February the secluded members took their seats in the House; and from that moment the members of the Rump began to think of providing for their personal safety. Many of them absented themselves, and gave up the field to the Presbyterians without a struggle. This majority voted in rapid succession, that Monk, their patron, should be commander-in-chief of all the forces in England, Scotland, and Ireland; that all the proceedings of parliament since their seclusion should be null and void; that Presbyterianism should be the one and sole religion; and that the league and covenant, without any amendment or toleration, should be posted up in all churches. On the 16th of March they passed an act for dissolving this parliament, with a proviso not to infringe the rights of the House of Peers. Writs were then issued for a new parliament, which was to meet on the 20th of April; and then Monk finished his bargain with Charles the Secondgiving advice but imposing no conditions—throwing the fate of the country at the feet of a dissolute and unprincipled man. On the 24th of April, the day before the meeting of the new parliament, Lambert, who had proved most satisfactorily that he was not a Cromwell, was shut up in the Tower, after an insane attempt at insurrection. When the parliament met, ten peers took their seats in their own House, confirmed the appointments of Monk, and voted a day of fasting to seek God for his blessing upon the approaching settlement of the nation. This was agreed to by the commons, who no longer challenged their title and rights. Circular letters were then sent for the other peers, who came up to Westminster by degrees, till the House, which had been so long empty, was nearly full. The distinction between those who had borne arms for the parliament, and those who had borne arms for the king, now seemed obliterated, and Presbyterian peers sat side by side with those who had always adhered to the liturgy and the established church. In the Lower House the Presbyterians formed an overwhelming majority, for the elections had no longer been controlled by the army, which absorbed in itself nearly all the republicanism of the country. Sir Harbottle Grimston was elected speaker, was' conducted to the chair by Monk and Hollis, and the House showed the utmost readiness in agreeing with the restored peers. On the 26th of April, the two Houses gave orders for a day of thanksgiving to God "for raising up Monk and other in to Ludlow, Haselrig," and some others of the republicans, took the alarm when they saw Monk restore the secluded Presbyterians, and Ludlow resolved to make him a visit, in order, he says, make a more perfect discovery of his intentions." When this very short-sighted republican urged the duty of fidelity and zeal for the common good, Monk replied with great unction, "Yea, we must live and die together for a commonwealth." But Monk had taken care to place a stout footman at the door, fearing that Ludlow might deal with him as his conscience told him he deserved. Soon after, Monk, in an interview with Haselrig, grasping Sir Arthur by the hand, exclaimed," I do here protest to you, in the presence of these gentle men, that I will oppose to the utmost the setting up of Charles Stuart, a single person, or a House of Peers." And, after this, expostulating on their suspicious, he said," What is it that I have done in bringing these members into the House? Are they not the same that brought the king to the block?-though others cut off his head, and that justly."-Ludlow's Memoirs. Ludlow, shifting the blame from himself, charges Haselrig with being Monk's dupe, and with indulging in unmanly despondence. struments of rescuing this nation from thraldom and misery;" and voted thanks to Monk "for his eminent and unparalleled services," On the 1st of May, Sir John Granville, who had been employed for some time in the negociations or bargainings between Charles the Second and the general, arrived again from Breda, and presented himself with royal dispatches at Monk's house. Monk, who continued to wear the mask when it' was no longer necessary, would not open the dispatches there, but ordered Granville to present them to him in the midst of the council of state. This was done; and, to carry on the farce, Granville was put under arrest-but, lo! it was proved that the letters were really from the king himself, and that they contained very upright and very satisfactory intentions; and Granville was released from custody, and the letters were sent down to parliament, and there read in the name of the king. One of these epistles was addressed to the House of Lords, another to the Commons, one to Monk, and another to the lord mayor, aldermen, and common council of London. The letter to the Commons contained the famous "Declaration of Breda," offering indemnity for the past and liberty of conscience for the future. This document, which will be noticed more at length in the next period of our history, was the only pledge that this parliament thought it necessary to require from a prince who had already proved, in many cases, that his royal word was not worth more than that of his father had been before him. Some time before this the zealous Presbyterians had been reminded that Charles's religion was at best but a devotion to prelacy; that he had been too long under the wing of his mother, too long in France and Flanders, "the most Jesuited place in the world," to have preserved even his Arminianism in a pure state; and that those of the Presbyterian judgment and covenant could expect nothing but certain ruin to their ways and their persons by a clenching and closing with such inconsistent principles; that the Independents, who had grown up under them, had hitherto allowed the men of their party as much freedom as they enjoyed themselves, and had admitted them to an equal participation in that grand privilege, liberty of conscience, which they could never hope to enjoy under the restored Charles; that the royalists would never leave "buzzing in his ear, to quicken his memory," that the interest of the Presbyterian party was in its infancy founded in Scotland the ruin of his great-grandmother, continued and improved in England by the perpetual vexation of his grandfather, and at length prosecuted to the decapitating of his father; and that the inevitable consequence of the Restoration would be the loss of all kinds of liberty and the utter ruin of the Presbyterians. But heated and blinded by their loyalty, the Presbyterians, who were all-powerful in the Commons, and far from weak in the Lords, disregarded all these warnings, and they named a * upon "Interest will not Lie." This pamphlet, in 4to., was written by Marchmont Nedham, and published in 1649. committee at once to prepare an answer to the king's letter, expressing their joy, the joyful sense of all the House, of his gracious offers, and their humble thanks for them, with professions of their loyalty and duty to his majesty. As for the Lords, they voted thanks to Sir John Granville for bringing these gracious letters; and declared that, according to the ancient and fundamental laws of the kingdom, the government is and ought to be by King, Lords, and Commons, and that some way should instantly be devised how to make up all breaches, and obtain the king's happy return to his people. The Commons forthwith agreed with the Lords in all this; appointed a committee to erase from their journals whatever acts or orders had been made inconsistent therewith; voted the king, who was penniless, the present supply of 50,000l.; sent a committee into the city to get that money advanced upon security and interest; agreed to an assessment of 70,000l. per month for three months, and sent another committee to join the Lords in drawing up an answer to his majesty's most gracious letters and declaration. And at the end of this busy day there was a wonderful lighting of bonfires, ringing of bells, firing of great guns, and drinking of the king's health. Prynne, who had got back into the house, and who could never forget the former tyranny of prelacy from which he had suffered so severely, made a hopeless effort to sober this intoxication; and that upright judge, Sir Matthew Hale, ventured to recommend that some more definite settlement should be made before the king were brought back; but Monk silenced them by telling them, that, as the king would come back without either money or troops, there was nothing to fear from him; and no other voice was raised against accepting the "Declaration of Breda" as a full and sufficient security, nor was a word more said about conditions and limitations. On the 2nd of May the speaker, Sir Harbottle Grimston, in returning thanks in the name of the House, and giving 500l. to Sir John Granville, said "I need not tell you with what grateful and thankful hearts the Commons, now assembled in parliament, have received his majesty's gracious letter; res ipsa loquitur. You yourself have been ocularis et auricularis testis de rei veritate. Our bells and our bonfires have already begun the proclamation of his majesty's goodness and of our joys. We have told the people that our king, the glory of England, is coming home again; and they have resounded it back again in our ears that they are ready, and their hearts are open to receive him. Both parliament and people have cried aloud to the King of Kings in their prayers, ' Long live king Charles the Second.'" The Commons continued running a race with the Lords in this new loyalty: first, they gave leave to Doctor Clarges, a member of their House, to go to the king from Monk, and then they resolved to send twelve of their members to wait upon his HE principal matter that remains for this chapter is the history of those rival forms of Protestantism which, in the course of the present period, first overthrew the ancient English church, and then, after their common victory, falling to contention and a trial of strength among themselves, were in their turn successively displaced, or attempted to be displaced, the one by VOL. III. the other. These sects may all be regarded as so many varieties of Puritanism, or as the motley brood of the spirit that in the reigns of Elizabeth and James was usually called by that name, and the origin and early progress of which have been already sketched in the preceding Book. The Puritanism that made its appearance in England after the establishment of the Reformation was, it may be remembered, chiefly derived from Geneva, where the severe theology of Calvin had struck deep root in the congenial soil, and flourished amain in the keen air, of republican institutions. Directly from this fountain-head came also the Puritanism of Scotland; for Knox, the great leader of the Reformation in that country, was a disciple of Calvin, and had been for some years the pastor 3 к of the English Calvinists at Geneva. The prin- | ciple of the Calvinistic or Presbyterian system of ecclesiastical polity was kept wholly out of the scheme of the English reformed church, on its restoration under Elizabeth, by the exclusive selection of its heads and rulers from those of the returned exiles who had belonged to the Lutheran congregation at Frankfort. The friends of the Geneva worship and discipline were thus in England either driven out of the national church altogether, or, if they remained in communion with it (which they generally did), were forced to refrain, to a great extent, for the sake of peace, from propagating or acting upon their peculiar opinions. It is true that, even thus circumstanced, they preserved a strong spirit of Puritanism within the country, and fostered, both among the clergy and among the people, that aversion to the ritual and government of the established church which eventually broke out into open dissent and separation. But in Scotland the ascendancy of Knox and his friends made the Reformation thoroughly Puritanical from the beginning, at least in so far as both the clergy and the mass of the people were concerned; and all that the government could do in resistance to the vehement course of the national feeling was to ward off for a time the actual establishment of a purely Presbyterian church, and to endeavour to maintain somewhat of the outward form of an opposite polity in association with the spirit and even many of the usages of the Geneva discipline. The restraint, however, which was thus put upon Presbyterianism in Scotland was so far from being sufficient to subdue its strength or temper, that it was only thereby irritated to a preternatural inflammation and ferocity, which made it the more restless under its bonds, and also the more able to break them asunder, the longer they enthralled it. It became, like a strong river dammed up, ready, whenever it should burst the fast-failing barrier that confined it, to precipitate itself in a raging and all-devouring inundation. But for the prodigious impetuosity with which the tide of Puritanism thus came rushing on from Scotland, it may be very much doubted if the less accumulated force of English dissent would have ever prevailed over the established church, or perhaps even risen with any very formidable violence against it, although, when the two streams joined their waters, the more diffused and sluggish naturally caught the fury of the other, and their united volume rolled along with a doubly tremendous power. Presbyterianism, also, iu imitation of what had been previously done by the people of Scotland, was the first shape in which triumphant Puritanism exhibited itself in England after its overthrow of the old establishment; and, notwithstanding both the influence subsequently acquired by Independency in the government, and the spread of that and other sects among the people, the national church, and also the national sentiment, continued to be, in the main, Presbyterian until the restoration of Episcopacy. This par ticular form of Puritanism, therefore, is the first subject we have now to take up; and a retrospect of the history of the Scottish kirk during the reign of James in his native country will most fitly introduce us to the scene of the subsequent contentions between Presbytery and Episcopacy in both kingdoms. Such an inquiry is calculated to throw light upon the whole course of events in the track of time we have been surveying; for, long before the civil war was begun by the Scots in the latter part of the reign of King Charles, the leaders of the opposition to the measures of the court in the English parliament were, it is well ascertained, in intimate confederacy with the ecclesiastical agitators in Scotland, and the movements of each party were generally taken in concert with the other. Yet no part of our history has been so much neglected, and consequently misrepresented, by the generality of our historians, The Scottish Solomon proved himself to be a person of lax principle, or no principle at all, in too many ways to leave us any excuse for charging him with acts of dissimulation or other obliquity which he never committed. "When the Long Parliament addressed King Charles to set up Presbytery in the room of Episcopacy," says a writer, whose misrepresentations do not commonly assume so bold or passionate a tone, "his majesty objected his coronation oath, in which he had sworn to maintain the clergy in their rights and privileges; but King James had no such scruples of conscience, for, without so much as asking the consent of parliament, general assembly, or people, he entered upon the most effectual measures to subvert the kirk-discipline which he had sworn to maintain, with hands lifted up to heaven, at his coronation, and had afterwards solemnly subscribed, with his queen and family, in the year 1581 and 1590."* "* James's coronation took place when he was an infant of thirteen months old; so that his hands, if they had been lifted to heaven at all upon that occasion, must have been held up by his nurse. But in truth it was not the baby king, but the Lords Morton and Home for him, that took the new coronation oath, to maintain and defend the religion then professed. And what was the religion at this time legally established in Scotland? It was not Presbytery. Popery and the mass, indeed, had been abolished by parliament seven years before, and a Protestant confession of faith and doctrine had been solemnly adopted. But Episcopacy had not been put down. Even if Knox's First Book of Discipline, with its twelve Superintendents, is to be regarded as having delineated a scheme of Presbyterian church-government, that scheme never had received the sanction of the state. It is true that the General Assembly had, from the first, evinced a jealousy or dislike of the Episcopal office; but that feeling had never been shared by the parliament, and bishops continued to be ap Neal, Hist. Pur. i. 390. |